by Daša Drndic
On Dutch TV Andreas Ban follows the preparation of salads and stews made from common purslane (also known as verdolaga, pigweed, little hogweed, red root, pursley, and moss rose, Portulaca oleracea), which he had picked the previous summer with Liljana Dirjan on Rovinj’s Punta Corrente. The Dutch chef sautés the fleshy leaves in butter, Andreas and Liljana had eaten it as a salad. Cookbooks say that purslane is a tasty wild plant that grows in spring and summer, of a mild salty-peppery flavor, which is not entirely true, it is a rather insipid little plant with a slightly bitter tang. To encourage consumers to make dishes from purslane, what is stressed without exception is that it contains Omega-3 fatty acids (currently “in”), then vitamins A, C and B, followed by minerals, numerous antioxidants such as magnesium, calcium, potassium and iron, and a whole lot more. How much purslane should be eaten for the human organism to get stronger, no one writes, no one says. Cookbooks and TV shows emphasize that it is good to combine purslane in salads with tomatoes, eggs, capers, olives, sheep’s cheese and salted anchovies, which once again suggests original recipes devised for idle consumers with deep pockets and no imagination.
The Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn was founded in 1887 and, of course, took its name from its founder. Those AH supermarkets can be found throughout Amsterdam. There are big ones and small ones, some better than others. Near Andreas’s building there is a small AH in which Andreas Ban finds shopping challenging. The tills are placed close together, so close that it is impossible for a cart to get through. In that small, constricted AH, there is always a crowd and everyone is in a hurry, people do not pack their goods tidily in bags, they just sling them in. Andreas finds it comforting that these markets are open every day, including Sundays, until 10 p.m., but even so they are always crowded. So Andreas goes in search of a larger Albert Heijn where he could, in a more leisurely way, discover Dutch and imported foodstuffs, and get lost. He got trapped in Amsterdam’s web of bridges and canals, walking into the wind and the rain, with no hat or umbrella and without a map. Then, on the other side of the street he catches sight of Dubravka Ugrešić. Straightaway he asks her, Dubravka, is there a larger AH in the neighborhood? and she says, I don’t know. They stand for a while, smoking, Dubravka Ugrešić and Andreas Ban, and they produce sentences resembling long strips of elastic that rhythmically stretch and loosen, there, in an empty Amsterdam street at five p.m., as it is getting dark. Then Andreas Ban goes on his way, although it would have been nice if he and Dubravka had ducked in somewhere for coffee or tea, but it is not the right moment. Staggering along, Andreas Ban sets off toward his house and on the way discovers on the corner of his Spuistraat and another street, it does not matter which, a vast AH, which as far as groceries go, fills the soul with calm. In that AH, Andreas Ban has time to communicate with the Dutch (who are very well-disposed to foreigners), listen to their advice in the matter of various Japanese, Chinese and Indian spices (which he does not use), no one pushes or pursues him, he is relaxed, he finds his soy milk, buys strawberries, a bottle of Chilean red wine and four kinds of cheese, some goat’s, some cow’s — Holland produces first-class cheeses in unimaginable combinations.
The Dutch like to eat. They nurture a culture of eating.
The winter of 1944–45 in occupied Holland was so harsh that it led to great hunger. Around thirty thousand people died. The Dutch remember that winter as the Hongerwinter, it is etched in their collective memory. That winter of 1944–45 brought back the misfortunes of all wartime winters, the distant ones and the more recent, such as the Sarajevo winters. Andreas learns that then, during that Hongerwinter, in the absence of any other sustenance, the Dutch ate tulip bulbs and sugar beets, making them into puree, porridge and sweets. In that winter of 1944–45, horses vanished because they were eaten. Trees vanished because they were cut down for fuel. Those who did not die became seriously anemic and clinically depressed, and the women infertile. Today there is a great deal of research into the consequences of that hunger on the human organism, as though hunger had disappeared. One such study concludes that Audrey Hepburn suffered all kinds of ailments because she went hungry in Amsterdam in 1944–45, that she acquired respiratory problems and edemas, and her blood count was low. Perhaps this is why the Dutch enjoy eating so much, talking about food and watching cooking shows, perhaps they are curing the trauma that is now etched into their genetic code and has become a tiny (Dutch) archetype.
So, as he strolls through Amsterdam’s familiar floating Bloemenmarkt (a flower market opened as early as 1862), not ten minutes’ walk from his apartment, and sees all kinds of gigantic bulbs, three times bigger than celeriac roots, before Andreas Ban’s eyes pops up the image of that famine and the situation in which flowers were turned into porridge. Then he buys ten small wooden tulips of various colors to give to people when he gets home. There are all kinds of stories about the Dutch tulips that arrived in Holland in the middle of the sixteenth century from the Ottoman Empire, when it would seem mass hysteria reigned, known as “tulipomania.” Tulipomania in Holland reached its height in February 1637, when it is said that one bulb was sold for four fat oxen, eight fat pigs or twelve fat sheep, for two tonnes of butter, five hundred kilograms of cheese, and so on to the point of complete madness. There was a similar floral hysteria in the Victorian age, the so-called “orchid delirium,” when fanatical orchid collectors sent their researchers to all corners of the world in order to look for new species.
Sylvia Plath wrote about tulips:
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands . . .
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address . . .
Then Andreas Ban remembers Operation Black Tulip and hurries to his apartment to watch the life of his neighbors across the street for a while, because he had promised himself that during his twenty-six-day stay in Amsterdam he will not research the obscenities of the Second World War. Rest from dragging all that worn-out baggage around, he said to himself, my own and other people’s, find a more cheerful occupation here, in Amsterdam. Go shopping, he said to himself, there are great bargains, buy shoes. He made a start, but feebly. He kept pushing the past away, Go back to your catacombs, he told it, but, like a slimy rivulet it surfaced and trickled around him, under his feet.
Like this:
Operation Black Tulip was carried out from 1946 to 1948. Its aim was to drive out of Holland all Germans, most of whom had settled there long before the war. It was not logical that all Dutch-Germans collaborated with the occupier. When Andreas Ban mentioned the Dutch Resistance Movement in conversation, Amsterdamers would say Bah and wave their hands, It was a lousy resistance movement, they would say, Holland had a lot of collaborators. Such generalizations are rotten, but that’s what it’s like in war (and afterward). Individual destinies sink, small lives merge into one great false mass event that keeps repeating its statistical story. In the end, 15 percent of the German population was driven out of Holland, that is, 3,691 civilians, because Operation Black Tulip was abruptly halted. According to the assessments of historians, however, it is presumed that around 170,000 citizens of Holland (of whatever national allegiance) had cooperated with the Nazi regime at a time when the entire population of Dutch-Germans was around twenty-five thousand souls. So the Dutch-Germans were probably meant to serve as sacrificial lambs on the national altar of innocence. Of course, Operation Black Tulip was a joke compared to the ten million Germans during the war and afterward forcibly scattered all over Europe; ten million disoriented people (many guilty, many entirely innocent), dragging their miserable bundles, streaming west from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania and the USSR, leaving behind the smudged traces of spent lives, which — like the cru
mbs of bread that Hansel and Gretel scatter behind them to retrace their steps home (but that’s a fairy tale) — became sodden in the passing of time. That’s how it is in wartime. Who cares about trifles? Names disappear, small lives bury themselves, forget themselves, or decay in old picture albums and slide off deathbeds.
Operation Black Tulip began on September 10, 1946 with arrests in Amsterdam, in the middle of the night. It was a Tuesday and it was raining. People had one hour to pack their belongings, fifty kilograms per person. The remainder of their property, including apartments and houses, firms and factories, was confiscated by the state. Then the human cargo was transferred to camps on the eastern border, most to Marienbosch, then to Germany, to the British occupied zone. In 2009 the Dutch census counts a population of 379,559 Germans living in Holland.
In 2010, Geert Mak, a popular left-oriented and politically committed Dutch writer and journalist, winner of multiple awards, and a lawyer, visits Croatia to promote his book In Europe. Andreas Ban asks him to speak about Operation Black Tulip. Geert Mak looks at Andreas Ban blankly, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I know nothing of Dutch Operation Black Tulip.
Zwarte tulp, says Andreas Ban, doesn’t it ring a bell?
Nee, nee — no, no.
Yes, for big history, historical tributaries dry up at once. Vanish. In their bed not even silt remains, nothing in the memory from which it would be possible to read a name, an existence, a small story, long since extinguished.
Throughout Andreas Ban’s stay in Amsterdam, the blinds on the windows of an apartment across the street had been down. The windows were right next to each other and, as in Andreas’s place, they probably stretched along the whole wall of a room. A woman lived there whom Andreas Ban had never seen, but she regularly hung her clothes out to air, or to straighten out the creases. Andreas Ban observed the appearance and disappearance of combinations of skirts and tops, dresses and jackets, slacks and shirts. First a little black dress hung by the window, disappearing in the evening. In its place came a brown skirt and a yellow pullover, in the morning they too disappeared. And so it went from day to day. The woman was roughly five foot eight, she weighed approximately 125 pounds, she went to work around eight a.m., came back around six p.m. and put the lights on. And (not witnessed by Andreas) hung her outfit by the window for the following day.
Another tenant had the head of a huge stuffed stag on his wall, its antlers branching into gigantic fans. He had chairs on which no one sat.
A third tenant had furnished his living room in shades of black and white, but his lamps were yellow. The walls were covered with paintings and the shelves were full of books. Andreas watched him eat, talk on the telephone and laugh. In the bedroom the double bed with orange sheets was never made. Then he vanished, he was not there for four days, the bed gaped empty, and Andreas grew worried. Then the shutters came down, he was back.
Andreas Ban bought shoes. Three pairs. Given that he walks less and less, with more and more difficulty, the shoes would remain new. Andreas nurtures a special tenderness for shoes. And for glass jars.
He did not escape the Second World War.
Andreas Ban calls in at the Athenaeum Boekhandel on the ground floor. All those people, all that milling around, the leafing through pages, the buying, the cash registers dinging — a quiet festival. New editions in various languages, old editions in various languages, whatever he looks for, he finds. As soon as he got to Holland he noticed Hemon’s Best European Fiction series published by Dalkey, with stories by Štiks and Ušumović, as though Igor and Neven and Saša were all there in Amsterdam, so Andreas sits with them in that little café on the corner, and tales of their lives start to flow, tales which, despite the war, had after all somehow turned out OK. When he came back to Croatia, Andreas went to see Marko in the Ribook Store to tell him how it had gone. They spent a whole hour sitting on the sofa, drinking coffee, and no one came in. Just one girl looking for decorative little address books, which the bookshop does not stock, so her appearance did not count. Then Marko said, I sold one book today — about I.T.
The Athenaeum Boekhandel is run by Herm Pol. Herm Pol is the striking, tall, gray-haired and well-read director of the Athenaeum Boekhandel, with whom one can talk about literature, he has a definite opinion about the books he orders. In Herm Pol’s shop Andreas buys Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven. He does not have anyone in Amsterdam to discuss that book with, in Holland the book came out a long time ago. It is a thick book, 736 pages, that does not require a pencil for underlining. Mulisch, whose mother was Jewish, had a personal, probably unsolved problem with Nazism, a family trauma he wove into his writing. So, in the novel De aanslag, in English The Assault, made into a film (and awarded an Oscar many years ago for best foreign film), Mulisch settles scores with his father, a “soft” Nazi, thanks to whom he and his mother were not deported to Auschwitz. Many elements in The Discovery of Heaven are redundant, there is all kinds of content in the novel, from Greek and Jewish mythology, the student uprising of 1968, classical mysticism, the Holocaust, astrophysical theories, Renaissance and other philosophies, to incomprehensible constructs, endless “cruel twists of fate,” incredible convolutions of plot, chance meetings and deaths, love trios and quartets, so much stuff stacked up that ideas and sentences barely breathe, crushed in an asthmatic clinch.
Andreas Ban also buys Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (in its French original Les bienveillantes, awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2006), which is 903 pages long, because people are still writing and discussing it, and concludes that the man (Littell) is not normal. Littell, like Mulisch, hooks on to mythology, to the Erinyes who are meant to take revenge on his narrator, but who tenderly grant him amnesty (as he was granted amnesty or was rather bypassed by all the courts that tried Second World War criminals), and the narrator, that Nazi Dr. Max Aue, an engineer and music lover, a latent and potent married homosexual in an occasional incestuous relationship with his twin sister, this emotionally castrated executioner who kills his mother and stepfather now that he has dodged justice, lays out his life before the reader, describing it in senseless and tedious detail (the battle of Stalingrad — more than one hundred pages), and manages, oh lord, a lace factory, and this not remotely delicate soul runs through his fingers that most delicate of all fabrics, which then seems an additional desecration. Worst of all about Littell’s book is that it is written in a language which is not, but aspires to be, literature. It is hard to find a justification for such a hideous confession in which at the very outset the narrator (Aue) states that he does not regret anything he has done, that what he did (and he committed diabolical crimes), he did with his eyes open, that he was only doing his job. Dr. Max Aue also affirms that he had realized that thinking is not always a good idea, so why then the need for fanatically obsessive descriptions of war and finally his diabolical address to the reader, You might also have done what I did, because everyone, or almost everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is told to do. I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you! Nowhere in 903 pages is there a single word about the possibility of choice (which Dr. Aue has), about the possibility of rebellion, about guilt. Ironically and superficially, the book is dedicated to the dead. All this might have been digestible had Littell’s book had a sense for language. It is the tedious report of a deranged mind. And for an analysis of the development, survival and functioning of deranged minds, of perverted sadists, there is no need to use the backdrop of Nazism, the pathological ideology of the Third Reich, the setting of war. On February 17, 2010, Andreas Ban reads a report from Ljubljana of an unheard-of scandal that has shaken Slovenia, news of the prominent doctor Saša Baričević who was maimed, torn apart and finally killed by his three bull mastiffs, because Dr. Saša Baričević was in fact a woman and, it is presumed, had used the dogs for sexual intercourse, which they could no longer tolerate. What about pedophile priests? And incestuous monsters who
for decades rape their own children in bunkers? Those are Dr. Max Aue’s kin.
Andreas Ban said to Herm Pol, This is all too much, both Mulisch and Littell, give me a Cees Nooteboom to get over them. Then Herm Pol said, Come back on Wednesday, I’ll introduce you to him.
The third book that tried to drag Andreas Ban into the Second World War was right on target because it was not a book about the war at all, but about a complex journey in search of one’s self, about poetry, it is poetry, about socialist poverty from which some fine souls are born, about love, about the quest for roots that leads nowhere because roots are an illusion, about legends, about a myriad of dreams that twinkle in constellations that people pointlessly drag through their lives. In his book Everything is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer entangles his reader in the hard knots of human destinies, but leaves space for laughter, allows him also to think. This is a book with images that fly after the reader like little swallows, they flutter, it is a fairy tale which frightens and heals.
Andreas Ban then talks with Herm Pol about the Dutch language which he finds more difficult to pronounce than to speak, because of the guttural sounds that demand practice to be correctly pronounced. Had he stayed longer in Amsterdam, Andreas Ban would have embarked on the adventure of learning Dutch, it would have been fun to do, although in Holland almost everyone speaks English.
These Dutch gutturals, says Andreas Ban to Herm Pol, as if we were in Africa, and Herm Pol says, You know, during the Second World War the Germans learned our language and tried to pass themselves off as Dutch, but it was precisely those joined consonants that they could not produce, so we would immediately recognize them.